Quitting on your Dream

We all face obstacles in pursuing our goals, whether they’re professional or personal, especially in the church.

We think we’re on the right track but wonder if we’ve chosen the wrong approach. We’re enthusiastic and hard-working, but our support system disintegrates when we need them the most. We’re just about to make significant progress when we run out of resources to make things work.

Tenacious as we may be, we all have our breaking points—that moment when the potential rewards stop justifying the effort. Usually that’s the hump that separates your best shot and your best reality.

Before you quit pursuing your dream and  move out of God's Will ask yourself the following question-has anything changed? Has God removed your dream or delayed it for a season?

You had a good reason for committing to this dream. Maybe you visualized a financial blessing once you started to grow, or you expected great changes as your vision was accepted by the people.

Odds are you still want those things as much as you did before; you just stopped believing you could have them because your attempts have yet to yield results. Now you have to ask yourself: If you push through the discomfort, will it be worth it in the end?

A concept studied in social psychology called “the sunk cost principle” indicates the more we’ve invested in something, the less likely we are to prematurely walk away.

How invested are you? How much money and time have you devoted? How many sacrifices have you made? Are you really willing to chalk it all up as a loss because you’re not feeling confident in your abilities? What would you tell someone else if they were in your shoes?

Would you tell your best friend to throw in the towel because they can’t possibly reach their goal? Or would you practice your finest motivational speech and help them see what you see in their potential? Unless you’re secretly a frenemy who hopes they fail in life odds are you’d push them to be their best—so why not push yourself?

It may sound kind of cheesy, but you need to be your own best friend. You, more than anyone in this world, deserve your belief and motivation.

If you’ve gone through all these questions and still feel resolute about the decision to give up, you have my blessing to abandon your goal. (Bet you feel so relieved!)

If you don’t or if there’s some lingering doubt keep working toward that dream that fills you with passion. Take a different approach if you need to. Enlist new assistance. Scale back your time commitment to something you can more easily maintain. But whatever you do, don’t give yourself a reason to one day utter the words, “I quit because I was scared.”